Like it or not, Islam is the charged centrality in our daily news headlines. Not just the Arab world or Afghanistan, it seems to lie behind a broad range of international disorders: suicide attacks, car bombings, military occupations, resistance struggles, riots, jihads, fatwas, guerrilla warfare, threatening videos and 9/11. But can these things be taken as an Islamic phenomenon without taking into account the principal elements of the ground situation in different parts of the world? What if Islam never existed? Remove Islam from the path of history, would the world have been a different place: no clash of civilisations, no holy war, no terrorists? What if that weren’t the case at all?
Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul who later became a professor of history and author of numerous books on the troubled Arab world including The Future of Political Islam now comes with A World Without Islam (Little Brown/Hachette India, Rs 595) in which he says the world wouldn’t be much different from what it is today: “deep-rooted conflicts that still exist over ethnicity, economics, warfare, armies or geopolitics … don’t have anything to do with Islam and indeed existed long before Islam came into existence.”
In his attempt to investigate whether there was something unique in Islam that breeds violence and conflict, Fuller divides his book into three parts. Part One, “Heresy and Power” spans the rise of Mohammed to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; Part Two, “Meeting the Civilisational Borders of Islam” has chapters on Islam in India and China and Islam in the West: Loyal Citizens or Fifth Column?: and Part Three, “The Place of Islam in the Modern World” with chapters on colonialism, nationalism, Islam, and the independence struggle and war, resistance, jihad and terrorism. As Fuller puts it, “I try to run through a whole lot of events and take Islam out of the equation and see what we are left with.” But these chapters are a kind of bird’s eye view of events; they cannot be taken as a definitive account of the histories of the period.
What it all boils down to is the idea that there is a continuity of geopolitics and grievances across the whole Islamic world that doesn’t need Islam to explain it. Rather, Fuller sees Islam – actually religion – as a banner in that Islam provided the organising principle for the Muslim empire that took over much of the world.
To elaborate his point that it is politics that calls the shots in the final analysis, Fuller takes the struggle over oil and energy in the Middle East as a case in point. “If the area were Chinese, would the region be any more accepting of big western oil companies trying to come in and dominate these things? And he adds emphatically: “I don’t think so,” with which most of us would agree. Fuller hastens to add that while he believes nothing would change with or without Islam, he was not advocating a world without Islam. All he was focused on was the nature of the struggle between the East and the West and whether “Islam plays a significant role in that”.
It is politics that decides the course of events, which he means the struggle to control natural resources and the means to have access to them. If this calls for tough diplomacy leading to military action, as often happened in the past, so be it: it is always self-interest dictated by vital economic interests that determines the course of history.
Thee underlying theme in book is the relationship between religion, power and the state. Fuller argues that the close relationship between religion and the state over much of western history has affected Christianity and Christian history vastly more than it has affected Islam and the Islamic world. For us, in India this would be hard to take because all round us from north Africa down to Malaysia we see the rise of Islamic states with other religions marginalised into the background. This makes many believe here that Islam is the most assertive force in both state and society, even in the secular West.
It isn’t surprising that Fuller has thrown in his bit on the clash of civilisations debate. He looks into the relationships between Islam and other major civilisations — Western Europe, Orthodox Russia, Hindu India and Confucian China, and the shifting accommodations that were reached between them; “cross pollination resulted” which suggested that Muslims managed their relationships with other cultures and religions with far greater sophistication than “commonly portrayed in more lurid and simplistic confrontation scenarios”. This would be accepted by secular historians here and where clashes took place they were more in the nature of “ethnic confrontations which may or may not have been augmented by religious differences on either side”.
The last part of the book examines some modern aspirations of the Muslim world, beginning with a look at the history of the Muslim struggle against colonial powers. Since much of the book is situated in the Middle East, it is the struggle against western imperialism that is elaborated here. But this has similarities with the anti-imperial struggles particularly in Asia, thereby providing a common bond between Islam and several other cultures that were confronted by the West. Fuller’s conclusion is simple: If there is a “problem with Islam” there is a problem with the West as well.
